Your website depends on its files, and the ability to manage them correctly is an integral part of running the entire online project.
Usually, you’ll most likely do this via the File Transfer Protocol (or FTP), though recent security concerns have prompted experts to advise using FTPS (FTP over a TLS) or SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) instead.
Regardless of whether you heed the specialists’ advice, the aforementioned methods for remotely managing files aren’t available sometimes.
Let’s imagine, for example, that you need to upload a file through someone else’s computer. Indeed, virtually all desktop operating systems can communicate with a server via an FTP connection, but they do it through a command-line interface.
It’s far from user-friendly, and inexperienced website operators are very likely to get stuck.
FTP clients are a viable alternative, but in our scenario, you are using someone else’s computer, and an FTP client might not be installed on it.
At this point, you might think that you’ve run out of options, but if you’re a hosting customer, you have one more way of uploading the data to the server.
Uploading a file through Control Panel’s File Manager
File Manager:
- an easy-to-use tool for uploading
- downloading
- managing remote files through your favorite browser
Navigating through it is pretty similar to navigating through the files and folders on your desktop computer, and you could argue that using it’s the easiest way of controlling the files and folders on your hosting account.
To upload a file, simply go to the directory where you want to put it, click the Upload button in the bottom-left corner of the window, and select Upload File.
A popup will appear through which you need to select the file you’d like to upload.
For additional convenience, Control Panel’s File Manager also supports multiple-file-upload. If a file by the same name and extension exists in the directory on the server, the system will ask you if you’d like to replace the remote file or keep it.
When the data is on the server, you can do pretty much everything you’d do using a regular FTP client, including:
- creating new directories
- deleting
- moving
- copying files
- changing permissions